Category - sex

We are living in a world where the question is not if your kids will see pornography, but when. We need to help equip our kids to deal with porn. This video shows 2 great books for parents of young children that you can read with your kids to help explain this tough topic.

My new Parenting: Navigating Everything talk is now completed. Love a chance to speak this to your parents at your church, school, conference, camp, or other events.

We all want the best for our kids but which parenting information do we choose? With over 75,000 parenting books produced in the past 21 years and the many voices, articles and online resources available, the task of figuring out where to turn for parenting advice is overwhelming. Some foundational parenting questions all parents must consider:

What are Parenting Styles and which ones should I be using in my parenting?
How can I gain better communication skills and use them with my children?
What does spending time with my kids look like?
How do I effectively discipline my children?
Various aspects of home life also need addressing, with each section being a sizeable discussion on their own. In this talk I will look at where parents can begin these discussions, (on-ramps) and give them practical tools so they can effectively talk with their kids about all of the following areas:

Family Discipleship (how to raise our kids in our Christian faith)

Health (mental, emotional, physical)

Sexuality (pornography, dating, marriage)

Media (TV, movies, music, social media)

Drug / Alcohol use & abuse

Education

Finances

Let’s look together at how we can best help our kids navigate the world they are growing up in.

They will not be with me forever, so I prepare them accordingly. – Trophy Child, Ted Cunningham

That’s the message of “Undercover High,” a documentary series on A&E that follows seven adults who pose as students for a semester at Highland Park High School in Topeka, Kansas.

The undercover students, aged 21 to 26 when the show was filmed last year, took classes, joined clubs, and saw firsthand the struggles teenagers go through in their everyday lives. Even for the participants who graduated as recently as five years ago, their return to high school was completely different from their first time around.

Here are seven things the undercover students learned about high-schoolers that most adults don’t realize.

This is not an easy article to read but it is a very important one for us as parents and leaders so we can see where culture it as today and how we help our kids to have a better understanding of pornography. I don’t think most parents faith-based or not would want their kids to view pornography, but we all need to talk to our kids about pornography and teach them how to process what they might see:

American adolescents watch much more pornography than their parents know — and it’s shaping their ideas about pleasure, power and intimacy. Can they be taught to see it more critically?

Statistics are also scary:

On average, boys are around 13, and girls are around 14, when they first see pornography, says Bryant Paul, an associate professor at Indiana University’s Media School and the author of studies on porn content and adolescent and adult viewing habits. In a 2008 University of New Hampshire survey, 93 percent of male college students and 62 percent of female students said they saw online porn before they were 18. Many females, in particular, weren’t seeking it out. Thirty-five percent of males said they had watched it 10 or more times during adolescence.

For all the parents who tell me that they want to be the ones to talk to their kids about sex and porn we seem to be failing in this regard:

It’s not surprising, then, that some adolescents use porn as a how-to guide. In a study that Rothman carried out in 2016 of 72 high schoolers ages 16 and 17, teenagers reported that porn was their primary source for information about sex — more than friends, siblings, schools or parents.

Drew, who had once used porn as his main sex educator, was now thinking about sex differently. “Some things need to come to us naturally, not by watching it and seeing what turns you on,” he told me. The discussions about anatomy and fake displays of pleasure made him realize that girls didn’t always respond as they did in porn and that they didn’t all want the same things. And guys didn’t, either. Maybe that porn clip in which the nice, tender guy didn’t excite the girl was wrong.

In our church world, we need to look at how we can have better conversations on pornography. With many of today’s teenagers getting their sex education from pornography we have to look at how we can help parents have this conversation in their homes, and then assist them by equipping and empowering them in our churches.

This actually would fall under a larger topic of equipping parents to help their kids get a Biblical Worldview of healthy sexuality. This would encompass everything from pornography, sexuality, dating, media awareness, pregnancy, STI’s, etc.